Choose to LoveExemplo

 Love your God

A million songs, a million poems and a million stories have been written about the meaning of love. You may have your own personal definition. Your friends might say that love involves feelings of admiration, need, intimacy, and appreciation. The Bible teaches us that a higher form of love for one another involves commitment and a desire to serve—spending ourselves to make someone else’s life better.

The Bible also invites, even commands us to love God. How can we not? We wouldn’t exist without his creative word. We would be doomed and damned without Christ. And we wouldn’t even be believers in the first place without the patient work of the Spirit to regenerate us. All this our God did because he loves us personally. Individually. How can we not love him back?

The Bible shows us how to put that God-love into action: “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well. This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands. In fact, this is love for God: to keep his commands. And his commands are not burdensome, for everyone born of God overcomes the world” (1 John 5:1-4). 

Here’s how you know when you are approaching that wonderful mind-set—when your prayers start to include the phrase, “Lord, it’s not so much what I want. What matters is what you want.”